The Washington Post spins the Zumbo saga, plus a timeline.

Blaine Harden, writing for the Washington Post, pulls a quote from freelance outdoors writer Pat Wray, implying that the grassroots outrage over Jim Zumbo’s gun bigotry blog post was the fault of the NRA:

“This shows the zealousness of gun owners to the point of actual foolishness,” said Pat Wray, a freelance outdoors writer in Corvallis, Ore., and author of “A Chukar Hunter’s Companion.” Wray said that what happened to Zumbo is a case study in how the NRA has trained members to attack their perceived enemies without mercy.[1]

I spent much of Saturday reading and commenting to the blog reaction to this news article. Many pointed the finger straight at the NRA and made comments like “they eat their own”. (You can peruse these blogs with a simple Technorati Search)

I’ve already written about Jim Zumbo’s comments and his apologies that fell flat, please look here for more info on that. Instead, I’d like to sketch out a timeline of the incident. Times are approximate, because in most cases I can’t be 100% sure of what timezone certain web servers are operating on.

Feb 18 at around 04:21 PM- Jim posts his first, (still confused about the issues), apology. This second post attracts 413 comments in about an hour, based on the time stamp of the first comment and the last one preserved when I took a snapshot. Last comment I preserved was at 05:30 PM. There were likely many more.

No, Phil
All he did was express his opinion and desire that a type of firearm (self loading semi-auto rifles) be BANNED, because he felt they were unsuitable for HUNTING. He managed to insult millions of owners, to boot, but that was gratuitous.
This is a problem because, first and foremost, the second amendment of the Bill of Rights, which is the guarantee of the right of the people to own firearms, isn’t about hunting.
Secondly, for one of ‘our own’ to advocate a ban, especially with HR 1022 in Judiciary Committee, can rightly be seen as offering aid and comfort to the enemy – those who are eager to abrogate our constitutionally recognised right.
Finally, his stated reasoning behind advocating such a ban was to provide himself ‘cover’ for his ‘hunting’ weapons. Cowardly, indeed.

You could also add timestamps from the monster Zumbo thread over at The High Road. I think some bloggers picked the story up from there, and there were several real-time comments that might shed a little light on it.

In any case, the NRA woke up well after the event and paddled like crazy to catch a wave that had already passed them by.

I might have mentioned before that I hate forums. Nothing personal, it’s just that it’s so hard to scrape the damn things for useful information, and I find the animated aviators, and the endless versions of the smiley thingys are truly annoying. Not every forums gives me a low bandwidth option or will give me 100 messages per page.

I’ve just discovered I can scrape the text off pages using the command line tool lynx using the -dump option, that and curl make things a bit easier. I’ll come over and take a look.

I’ve seen the full text around a bunch of places, but I’m unsure of my rights to republish under fair use. So I’ve emailed you the links of my text scrape. They are about 1.6 MB and .2 MB each, and both include some, but not all comments.

I support your right to own guns. I support it mostly because it increases the odds that you will kill yourself or your children in a gun accident.

And face it, every time a gun nut, or the child of a gun nut, dies, the world becomes a better place.

So please keep buying assault rifles and hollowpoint ammo. And I will keep laughing at your gun and hunting accidents.

Sure, most of you will live. But IÃ¢â‚¬â„¢ll piss on the rest of your graves.

Posted 26 Feb 2007 at 7:13 am

How completely dispicable you are! To endorse the loss of life of another person…and children!
YOUR forefathers carried firearms to ensure that you would have freedom to say those horrible things about other people who have better sense.

AS for Zumbro…How did he expect the world of firearm owners to react when he said those things?

Had you done a lick of original research instead of regurgitating the swill that was spoon-fed to you by the WaPo you would have realized that this was a grassroots response to ZimboÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s post. Thousands of posts per day were posted on JimÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s blog before that blog was pulled offline. Then Jim resigned his position. All of that went down before the NRA issued their first press release….

That’s probably not what needs to be said to win people over to our side.

Zumbo commited career suicide by calling the owners of these rifles “terrorists” and saying that they should be banned. As stated above, the NRA was slow to say anything at all. The Brady’s are quick to offer up cherry picked quotes from Zumbo and others, but there is not a word about his second (sincere) apology.

After cruising the Brady Blog and reading the comments posted by their supporters, I’ve come to the realization that there’s no reasoning with these idiots. They feel that the world works a certain way and therefore it must be so. No amount of logic, reason or facts will dissuade them. The only ones that can be reached are those on the fence about the issue.